Charles Spinosa has been a management consultant for the last 27 years. He draws on thinking from philosophy and literature to develop leaders, change organizational cultures, and develop new customer propositions. He has worked with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups in Europe, the US, Canada, Latin America, and China. Before entering management consulting, he taught Shakespeare at Miami University in Ohio and then philosophy at U. C. Berkeley.

With Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Charles published Disclosing New Worlds (The MIT Press, 1997). The book looks at innovation in business, politics, and culture from a philosopher’s perspective. In 2024 with Matthew Hancocks, Haridimos Tsoukas, and Christopher Davis (on organizational culture), Charles published Leadership as Masterpiece Creation (The MIT Press). The book provides conceptual and practical frameworks for leaders to create morally distinctive organizations: masterpieces. Charles received his B.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley. Charles lives in New York City.

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Before discussing Leadership as a Masterpiece Creation, here are a few general questions. First, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) years ago that set you on the career  course you continue to follow? Please explain.

Rather than a turning point or epiphany, it was more a one-two-three combination punch that turned me from an academic career to a consulting career. The first punch came while I was in graduate school completing my Ph.D. on Shakespeare and the common law. To support myself, I became a building manager and developed friendships with a few M.B.A. students in the building. Like many others, they assumed that people were simply good-natured, and that a leader with a good strategy, aligned incentives, and mostly kind words would succeed and aligned incentives produced coordinated, up-beat, and positive leader behavior. (Like most at the time, the understood Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field as a character flaw.) Further, they nbelieved that risk was mostly financial and could be hedged. As a literary scholar, I was sure that they were deeply mistaken about the motivations of the leaders they admired and about their own motivations.

So, I took them to see Shakespeare’s Othello. I consider it the perfect Shakespearean tragedy because Othello dies to preserve his life story as a great, passionate military leader who loved, not wisely, and took his own life justly. He sought to be “all in all sufficient.” Other than Othello himself, the key character in Othello is Iago.

The famous 19th-century poet Coleridge described Iago as a case of motiveless malignancy. Throughout the play he gives multiple believable but contradictory reasons for why he hates Othello. He talks Othello into believing that Desdemona, whom Othello has just married, is faithless and into murdering her. My M.B.A. friends were shocked at the depth of Iago’s and Othello’s passion and its believability. There was nothing like it in business case studies. The most important thing was that these characters had passions so deep that they were willing to kill and die for them. I called that a self-defining passion. That is what made these characters’ lives rich. The richness meant that they could form subtle strategies and face challenges with huge amounts of resilience. M.B.A. students pride themselves on their capacities for strategy formation and for resilience. In their studies, they never saw anything like that exhibited in Othello.

Last, Othello committed his noble actions for the sake of the story of his life, which he valued above anything. That counted to him more than any other success. I suggested to my M.B.A. friends that the Silicon Valley leaders they admired so much had, as] well, self-defining passions for which they would be willing to sacrifice almost anything, if not their lives, and that their strategies and resilience came from such a deep passion to create themselves and their businesses together.

I could see that the play and our discussion of it got through to them. The depths of motivating passions and the nobility and viciousness that could rise from them remained something to think about and something to question themselves about. I knew that they were asking, What is my defining passion? What am I living for? What even would I die for?

So, the first punch was the realization that I could help M.B.A. students to see leadership far more richly by introducing them to defining passions. The second punch came while I was writing Disclosing New Worlds with Fernando Flores and Bert Dreyfus. At the time, Fernando Flores ran his own consulting company Business Design Associates and invited me to work with him at one of his top clients, CEMEX. Under the leadership of Lorenzo Zambrano, CEMEX was growing from a local Mexican cement company to the third largest cement company in the world.

Lorenzo Zambrano asked Fernando to bring to his senior team the same zeal and strategic inventiveness Zambrano himself had. We realized that a place to start was by finding Lorenzo Zambrano’s defining passion and showing how it drove him to take profound strategic actions that played out at a more profound level than financial and market share returns.

Since Fernando and I believed that brilliant strategy and implacable resilience arise from defining passions, the point would be to get the senior team living their lives at the same pitch as Lorenzo Zambrano lived his.

In conversation, Zambrano explained that his awakening came at Stanford Business School. It was there that he first saw the beauty of financial transparency. The transparency of US markets was like nothing he experienced in Mexico at the time, and he was sure that if he could make CEMEX (his family was the largest shareholder) financially transparent, he could reduce the costs of debt, and grow it into a global company whose financial practices would be imitated throughout Latin America.

Once he graduated from Stanford and became CEMEX’s CEO, he took decisive actions to increase transparency, borrow at lower rates, and grow throughout Mexico and Latin America. However, the financial press, financial analysts, his own team, and competitors saw Zambrano’s actions as mere financial engineering to get a small edge in Latin America. Financial analysts thought that taking over relatively poorly run Latin American companies simply was no big deal. Then came an opportunity to buy a major Spanish cement company. But Zambrano would need significant debt financing from US markets to do it. In testing the waters, he found that he could not sell bonds to finance a European acquisition.

The prejudice against a Mexican company competing successfully in Europe was too strong. However, he could sell US financiers a debt package to consolidate all the debt he had and he could even include with a small clause that said that the financing could go to an acquisition if one was unusually attractive. Zambrano faced a deep moral anomaly.

To become the recognized leader in financial transparency, he would have to sacrifice financial transparency with that small clause. Others would have either given up on the financing to maintain a reputation for transparency or taken US financing, made the Spanish acquisition, and given up on re-establishing a reputation for financial transparency. Because of his passion, which even his own team did not see, Zambrano sacrificed transparency (with only the small clause), took the hit to his reputation, ran the Spanish company profitably, and worked for years to re-establish his reputation in the US financial markets.

Zambrano’s team saw him as a genius but until we drew out the story, they did not see the role of] his defining passion. Once they did, we were able to lead them in workshops to find their own. We developed the workshops around the question, “What always goes wrong here?” Two members of Zambrano’s senior team caught the fire for creating a masterpiece (though we did not have the term then).

After that experience came the third punch in the combination, Fernando asked me if I were content to teach 20-year-olds for the rest of my life or whether I would like to teach senior executive teams the lessons I had learned from literature and philosophy. I made the jump leap.

Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First, from Lao-tse’s
Tao Te Ching:

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

Lao-tse describes in detail what I tend to call Socrates’ maieutic (midwifery) method; consultants, coaches, and other advisors transform people and organizations by drawing the best out of them and helping them make their best performance their standard performance. The people in the organization then say. We did it ourselves. The consultant, coach, or other advisor played no important role. Masterpiece creators face a similar dilemma. They take morally shocking actions that change moral normative orders, but when people look back from familiarity of the new normative order, they say that the morally shocking action was totally
unnecessary; the leader could simply have made a rational presentation shift was present. Perhaps, Steve Jobs suffered the most from this judgment.

From Voltaire: “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”

Those who seek truth also bring wonder that so much is unknown and, if history is any guide, some of what we most cherish as true is in fact false. Those who claim to have found the truth and therefore stop truth-seeking bring rancor directed at disbelievers and deniers. As finite, perspectival beings, wonder is our blessing and rancor our curse.

From Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget
what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou is right, but it wasn’t always so. Michel Foucault has taught us that our ethical substance (what we apply ethical rules to) has changed over time. We remember what touches our ethical substance. We used to remember actions (our earliest ethical substance); then we remembered desires (our own and others’); then we remembered thoughts and words; and now we remember our and others’ feelings. People really were quite different in the past. What is next? I hope it is remembering admirable creations: masterpieces.

From Theodore Roosevelt: “People won’t care how much you know until they know how
much you care.”

Roosevelt’s is a basic compositional feature of telling truth to power. Include in your truth-telling your care as well as your wisdom. Otherwise, do not be surprised by hostile rejection.

In your opinion, what are the defining characteristics of a workplace culture within which personal growth and professional development are most likely to thrive?

Personal growth and professional development thrive in masterpiece organizations. Those are businesses where the leader or leaders of divisions are facing a moral anomaly, generally something that always goes wrong and that managers have historically worked around and then determined to resolve the anomaly. Like Rosa Parks, the leaders will engage in seemingly immoral actions that with luck shift the moral normative order of the organization and come to be seen as the right thing to have done.

The team members are complicit in that moral change and eventually see themselves and the world differently. They come to live in moods of hope, admiration, zeal, or joy, and they sense that the most seemingly fixed principles in an ethical life can be changed and that they and their teams can change them and themselves at the same time.

Looking ahead (let’s say) 3-5 years, what do you think will be the greatest challenge that  CEOs will face? Any advice?

The greatest challenge will remain the same as it has been for decades if not longer: seeking and finding distinctive truths about one’s business, customers, markets, owners, and suppliers. It is, however, a growing challenge for five reasons.

First, we live at a time when those advising business leaders are telling them to cultivate teams that share diverse views—it’s called radical candor. Rather than argue over what is true and then commit to the result because it is true, these teams share views to find which is most agreeable. Then to get people to open up and share their views, CEOs are told to create psychologically safe workplaces. Expecting psychological safety in the workplace is quicksand, a bottomless pit.

There is never enough safety. There cannot be. Any distinctive, new truth will always threaten someone; it will always ask someone to give up something she or he cherishes. Speaking any truth worth speaking entails identity risk.

Second, we are beginning to see that we live in a plural-truth world. We sometimes call it post-truth, but many of the so-called post-truth speakers are generally aiming at truth, sometimes a factual truth about the world, sometimes a more poetic truth that exaggerates to shock us and then let us see things as they are, and sometimes a practical truth that enables us to get something done even if we don’t know why it works.

Increasingly, we do not know which mode of truth- saying we are hearing. Plural Plural-truth discourse then seems like post-truth discourse. It Plural-truth speaking and thinking happens in the highest of discourses. Does quantum mechanics tell us what the facts are about the universe? Or does it tell us how to get things done with waves and particles? Quantum physicists are not sure. It used to be clear what the nature of a truth claim was relevant truth was: We could manage with for instance both:, France has a jagged coastline, or, and France is shaped like a pentagon.

Today, it’s less easy to know what kind of truth we are listening to.

Which tells us the truth about our customers? The big-data records of all their transactions in response to our promotions over the course of the year? Or the synthesized narrative of the typical 30-year-old customer with desires, hopes, education, and income? For many, navigating plural truths sends us back to sharing views instead of pressing hard for what is so.

Third, with tribes forming around different plural truths, we find rancor rising faster than wonder. Who says, “Don’t we feel wonder at exploring how Democrats and Republicans see things so differently?”  Who says, “I feel nothing but wonder when I see how Amazon and Google can succeed while treating employees so differently?” Very few.

People take sides. In fact, people take rancorous, self-righteous joy in condemning one party or the other, one company or the other. I’ve seen CEOs try to raise the question, “Should we manage more like Amazon or more like Google?” only to engender disgust from those on both sides. They feel it an outrage that the question could even be asked. Truth-seeking stalls. Questioning about what is distinctively right for one’s own company hits the wall of party politics.

Fourth, artificial intelligence is getting better and better. As a research tool, it is roughly at the level of an A- student, only writing with better grammar. It won’t have its own insights on why a marginal finding here or there would be worth exploring. But it is blazingly fast and well-informed. As an advisory tool, it is beginning to work at the level of a B student, only one who does the work in the blink of an eye. Because of the amount of data artificial intelligence can synthesize quickly, it makes the question of whether we want to look at all the data on sales over the last year or Marketing’s composite customer a real question. Truth-seeking thrives on the wonder over what we do not know and the excitement of going out to the field to explore and then back to the study to analyze. Should artificial intelligence curb that wonder in the interest of time or indolence, CEOs will miss their own and their organization’s distinctiveness as their artificial intelligence tools advise adopting the average best practice on top of the average best practice. Moreover, without wonder, the rancor becomes more attractive.

Fifth, I expect that regulation in the US will decrease over the next few years. That opens space for CEOs to identify what is distinctive about them, their organizations, and their customers and build on it. Less regulation increases risk and responsibility.

It could also motivate seeking more safety, doing what is agreeable, avoiding knotty questions over what kind of truth to seek, avoiding difficult discussions that are apt to generate rancor, adopting what the artificial intelligence researcher advises, and losing distinctiveness mas truth-seeking dwindles. The good of deregulation could disappear in fear.

Response to challenge 1 with is over the risk of speaking truth to power: Level with your teams. You need them filled with courage. You need people to speak truth to you and to others. Train them to compose truth claims so that they show wisdom and care. But do not lie to your teams about their safety. Truth claims worth speaking will be threatening to some and some in power. Cultivate and reward courage every day.

Response to challenge 2 which is the discovery of over the plural-truth world: When listening to something that seems very appealing or very wrong, ask what kind of truth claims you are hearing. Evaluate them according to the kind. And then ask whether that is the kind of truth claim that will help you act. Do not go on about one version of the truth. There never was such a thing. Truth always depends on truth-seeking, and truth-seeking does not happen in only one way. Moreover, truth-seeking starts with insights and then vetting. Always look for cases that disconfirm what sounds appealing.

Response to challenge 3 which is the growth of rancorous tribes: Manage rancor, first, by establishing respect for truth-seeking. Truth-seeking means going into the field and doing research there as well as reflection and discussion in the study. Honor the field above desk research. Strong, rancorous views frequently come from secondhand information and not the field with all of its contrary possible interpretations. Second, center oneself by determining what you believe to be true for good reasons, what you suspect is true for weak reasons, and what you do not know of have not explored firsthand. Ask your team to do the same.

Third, manage moods. Ask for wonder, joy, hope, admiration, or zeal. Call out anger, contempt, self-righteousness. “That sounds a bit self-righteous to me, could you find another way to say it?” Use humor: “Could you make that sound a little more contemptuous.”

Response to challenge 4 regarding getting lazy in the face of AI: How can you avoid getting lazy and just following what your artificial intelligence researcher or advisor tells you? Follow the old chestnut about the difference between the Classic and the Romantic ages. In that Classic age, one asked, “Is that true?” In the Romantic age, one asked, “Is that true for me?” Always ask, “Is that true of (or apply to) our customers, of our markets, of our employees, of our suppliers, of our owners, and of our time?” Is it true for me?

Response to challenge 5 regarding fear in deregulation: Always start with the question, “What would I love to do in this circumstance?” Then follow with, “What would be the benefit?” Leaders generally rise from the ranks of managers, and managers succeed by making brilliant tradeoffs and demonstrating creative artistry within constraints. They don’t get to do what they’d love to do.

My two basic breakthrough-driving questions are, “What always goes wrong here in this industry?” and “What would you love to do?” The second is almost always the harder one to answer. And when it is answered, the CEO’s team turns very quickly into constraint-waving naysayers. That’s why it is essential to ask the benefit question immediately after answering the love question. These questions will prevent CEOs from playing it safe in a period of deregulation. Generally, what you love to do points at something distinctive about your leadership, organization, or customers.

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Charles invites you to check out the resources at these websites::

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